Holiday Shopping Trends: Lessons from 2010

[tweetmeme]The holiday season 2010 has shown that online retail, and increasingly social media and mobile, are becoming the growth engines for retailers everywhere. Consumers embrace online shopping not only for its ease and convenience, but as a primary means of researching goods and services.

This is according to the latest report published by CoreMetrics, a web analytics and marketing optimization company, entitled “Coremetrics Online Retail Holiday 2010 Benchmark Recap Industry Benchmark Analysis and Trends.”

The report looks at the retail performance during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, comparing the holiday seasons of 2010 and 2009. The findings of their study are as follows:

The shopping trend continued to gain momentum. With product views and the average session length for site visits on the decline, consumers have become much more directed in their online shopping behaviors.

Department stores have become the research engine of choice for consumers looking for deals and product promotions. As a consequence, shoppers were spending more time year over year on department store sites throughout the holiday season.

Health and Beauty had a very strong holiday season in terms of sales as well as new visitor traffic. November jumped 90.1 percent and December increased 46.1 percent over 2009 for the number of new consumers completing their first purchase on their sites.

Luxury goods made a comeback this holiday season with consumers spending more overall and splurging on higher ticket items.

The growing trend of consumers using their networks on social sites for information about deals and inventory levels continued throughout the holiday season. While the percentage of visitors arriving from social network sites is fairly small relative to all online visitors—nearly 1 percent—it is gaining momentum, with Facebook dominating the space.

Consumers are continuing to rely more heavily on their mobile devices to find the best deals. While the percent of site traffic increased over the holiday season, the percent of sales from mobile devices increased as well.